Handling bug reports and development requests

The vogella GmbH trial on OpenReq tools

vogella is now conducting a trial to integrate the OpenReq platform with the Eclipse IDE.

The vogella GmbH is a German company based in Hamburg. Alongside with companies such as IBM and Redhat, it is one of the major contributors to the Eclipse open source project. The Eclipse project is well-known for its Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Broadly, vogella provides services ranging from technology development, production and development support, training and mentoring relating to the Eclipse IDE framework and project and Android development.

Eclipse´s Bugzilla system for bug reports

What is interesting is that vogella is now conducting a trial to integrate the OpenReq platform with the Eclipse IDE. The Eclipse open source project uses the Bugzilla system to store bug reports and development requests communicated by the open source community. As Bugzilla contains a very large number of reported issues, queries to the system produce overwhelming lists of issues. Such lists can be daunting to a person willing to contribute to the open source project.

An Eclipse plug-in for a better representation of bugs

One of the focuses of the trial is, therefore, to develop a better representation of bugs and requirements of the Bugzilla system. To be brief, Bugzilla has some filters and tools to narrow down the search results. The representation, however, is not optimal.

As a part of the OpenReq project, vogella has developed an Eclipse Plug-in. The plug-in takes into account the user’s preferences and previous work to delimit the search results. Furhermore, the results can be presented as a personalised priority list and a pie chart. Vogella has also developed the representation of the most discussed bugs of the month. It shows the issues of most interest in the Eclipse community.

On the other hand, the trial concentrates on developing analysis and decision-making tools. In an open source project it is important to determine which feature requests and bugs should be prioritised. Similarly, pirioritisation is important in any product development project. The vogella GmbH has a key role in the integration of the new requirements-related decision support system in the making into the Eclipse IDE.